Kristofer
Siy,
Graduate
student
Combinatorics
and
Optimization
Paying attention to structure is one fundamental part of doing mathematics. Though we try to foster our students’ structural reasoning capabilities through their experiences learning mathematics at the university level, one might wonder what can be done to advance structural reasoning at earlier stages in students’ mathematical development. Over the past year, the Discrete Math Partnership Collaborative has brought pedagogically sensitive mathematicians, math educators, and high school teachers in California together to redesign a high school discrete math course. This course includes a unit on combinatorial games, a topic not usually covered in high school or university discrete math courses.
In this talk, I will provide an overview of the DMPC, illustrate how the combinatorial games unit in particular elicits different categories of structural reasoning from students, and discuss potential implications for how university educators might better cultivate students’ structural reasoning, especially at the early university level.